This episode of Simple Civics: Greenville County is brought to you by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, providing free books to children zero to five throughout Greenville County. To sign up, visit greenvillefirststeps.org/freebooks.
Navigating the Greenville County budget can feel like reading a foreign language, but the League of Women Voters of Greenville County is here to translate. Their president, Susan Bell, shares how their new "Budget Basics" resource helps residents track exactly where their tax dollars go. We move past the intimidating 200-page documents to show you how local government spending actually impacts your daily life.
We break down the complexities of property taxes, millage rates, and the five core priorities driving our local economy. Susan explains the League's seven-part educational series, which covers everything from public safety and infrastructure to the often-confusing reassessment process. You will gain a clearer understanding of how to read your tax bill and why the upcoming budget cycle is the most critical time for civic engagement as the next budget gets underway.
If you want to move beyond just writing a tax check and start influencing how your community grows, this episode is for you. It is a practical guide for any resident looking to turn confusion into a seat at the table. Tune in to learn how to use your voice before the next fiscal deadline.
Episode Resources
Introduction to the League of Women Voters
Katy Smith: Approving a budget is one of the most important things a governmental body does because it is what funds all of the services and infrastructure of a city, county, state, or other political jurisdiction.
But understanding the budget and the process by which it is developed can be confusing for a voter. If we as constituents don't understand it, it's not likely for us to get involved in that process and let our elected officials know our opinions and desires.
Thankfully, there's a new resource in Greenville County that can help. I'm Katy Smith with Greater Good Greenville, and on this episode of Simple Civics Greenville County, I talk with Susan Bell, president of the League of Women Voters of Greenville County.
Susan tells us about the League's amazing Budget Basics resource, which includes short and easy-to-understand videos, frequently asked questions, links to helpful websites, and much more. You might not be familiar with the League of Women Voters and why they'd produce such a resource, so let me give you a little history.
The League of Women Voters evolved out of the women's suffrage movement in the early 20th century. When the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920, the leadership who had worked so hard to gain the right to vote wanted to help women understand what they could do with that new right.
They're not just for women, though, they also welcome men to join. For 106 years, they have been a nonpartisan, activist, grassroots organization that believes voters should play a critical role in democracy.
In Greenville County and in South Carolina, they are all volunteers and voters just like you, and I'm pleased to introduce their new county budget resource to you. As always, there are lots of links in the show notes, so be sure to take a look. I am grateful to Susan Bell, President of League of Women Voters of Greenville County, for joining us today.
Susan Bell: Thank you, Katy. It's great to be here.
Why the County Budget Matters
Katy Smith: You and I are both very interested in civic engagement, obviously, and we are both interested in but a little bit confused by the Greenville County budget. But you all are making it easy for folks. So first, let's talk about why a listener should care about the Greenville County budget.
Susan Bell: That's a great question, Katy. And it's one that is easy for people to not care about because it's something that happens in the background and we don't tend to think about it as much. We just see things happening.
But the budget is based on our money. So the reason people should care about it is because it's your tax dollars that are going back to your community.
You have an opportunity to have an opinion about how that money is spent. You pay the money in, you see how it gets spent, and it gets spent by elected officials, so you have the opportunity to tell them what you think.
Budget Priorities and Revenue Sources
Katy Smith: So when you think about the priorities and interests that people have about how their community is run and the services they receive, that's answered by the budget. What are some of the priorities that people might see lifted up in the budget of Greenville County?
Susan Bell: The budget starts by explaining what the county's priorities are. So for 2026, which was the most recent budget that was approved, there are five priorities.
Public safety, so think EMS, sheriff; fiscal responsibility and transparency; infrastructure, which is roads, bridges, sidewalks, sewer; economic development—how do we bring new businesses into the county to create jobs?
Then there is strategic growth and land management, which is a big topic of conversation in Greenville because some people think we're growing too fast. Some people think we're not growing fast enough.
They have opinions about where housing is going. The county starts with those priorities and they outline them in the budget document. When you think about the priorities, all those things impact our daily lives.
Then you look at how they pay for those things. They tell you what's important and then they have to decide how they're going to pay for them, how much money they need, and how much money they have.
That starts with property taxes. If you're a homeowner or you have a car or a boat in Greenville County, you pay property taxes. Property taxes make up about 45% of the total budget.
Then there's another 20% that comes from fees like solid waste fees. That gets us to about 65% of the budget. So your house and your car is paying for a whole lot of what the county does.
You also pay state sales tax and you pay federal taxes. Those are part of the county budget, too. The county gets money from the state and from the federal government for specific things.
You pay state taxes, which help fund local spending. You also pay federal taxes that come back to the county for specific things like roads. But you have a whole package of taxes that you paid in some way or another that go into what the county invests back in the community. It's your money being spent in your community.
Challenges and Complexity in the Budget Process
Katy Smith: So it is important to pay attention to. And it makes sense. I think all of us listening, if you make a personal budget, you've put priorities in it.
Do you have kids getting ready to go to college? Are you planning a big vacation? Are you getting ready to retire? That should drive how you're spending your money.
Our county is thankfully doing the same things and thinking about priorities for all of us. Now, having said that, that was pretty simple and straightforward, but the budget document and process itself can be really confusing. This is not to dissuade you from paying attention, listener, but it can be a little confusing. What have you heard that confuses folks?
Susan Bell: Budgeting on this scale is sophisticated accounting and planning. It's not really designed to be something that somebody just sits down and reads before they go to bed at night. It can be very confusing for people who aren't trained in that.
That doesn't mean that the county is doing anything to make it confusing. We actually have a great team of people who are very helpful and transparent about the process. It just means that a 207-page document is complicated.
The first thing that might be confusing is how to read your property tax bill. When we started looking at the tax bills and thinking about how to explain it, there's a lot of very complicated things on there. There are a lot of terms that people don't use normally, like assessed value or millage rates that go into it.
2025 was a property tax reassessment year, which is driven by state law. There's a very specific process that the county goes through to do that. In December, people got a tax reassessment notice and they got a tax bill for 2025.
It was very complicated and very confusing, and people have questions about that. Another thing that's confusing to people is how the decisions are made, when they're made, and by whom.
If you're like me, you write a check, you pay your bill, you check that box and move on to whatever's next, and you don't really think about the process between here and there.
How does the county take the money you send them and funnel that through the process and turn it into road repairs on your street? There's a very detailed process for how that happens.
Insights from County Council Meetings
Katy Smith: I mean, yes, you can imagine how much work happens from me sending in my check for property taxes to me seeing a pothole filled or going to the service center to drop off old trash that's been cluttering my attic.
There's a lot in between. You and I both sat in some county council meetings last year being pretty savvy civic people, but finding it to be a little perplexing.
Susan Bell: You're right, Katy. During the 2026 Greenville County budget process, several of us just started attending the meetings to follow the process, to learn more about what was going on and how things worked.
What we found is that it's complicated and it's confusing. There were a lot of topics of conversation that got emotional, too. You have the numbers on one hand, but you also have a lot of heated feelings that go into the decision making.
It can be hard just to follow what's actually being discussed. The meetings move really quickly. When amendments are offered or changes are made, it can be very confusing to just keep up with the playbook.
The more we attended the meetings—and the county council is really good about having workshops on specific things, too. When they want to learn more about something, they invite experts in and do a workshop. We attended some of those.
We came away with a lot of questions about the process and about the terminology. It seemed like the more we learned, the less we knew. The other thing that we learned is that there's never enough money to do everything that needs to be done.
That is true at home. It's true with businesses, and it's especially true in governments. South Carolina in general is a very tax-averse state, and one of the priorities of the county council is to reduce taxes.
We're in this position where they want to charge people less money and still provide a good level of services, and that requires a lot of negotiation and a lot of compromise. We sat through all those meetings and sat and looked at each other going, "What?"
We decided that if we had questions, other people probably did, too. A small group of us came away thinking this might be a really good opportunity for the League of Women Voters to create an educational series that helps people understand some of these things and helps them understand the process in a way that ultimately leads to them being engaged.
I do want to really give a shout out to the council members who worked so very hard learning a lot of the processes that are involved. Last year was the first year for several of them to be on the council. Everything was new.
They spent a lot of time and realized that this is time they're taking away from other things, whether it's governing or their personal lives or their businesses. They had workshops on a lot of things and they heard comments from people about different things like funding.
Do we need a sales tax? Do we need impact fees? They worked really, really hard in a very short period of time to learn a lot of this.
The Budget Basics Educational Series
Katy Smith: That's great. Okay, so you all learned a lot and you are sharing your notes with all of us through the wonderful new set of modules that you have available. Tell listeners about it and how they can access it.
Susan Bell: We created seven short video modules, each less than 10 minutes long. They're YouTube videos posted on our website, so they're very easy to access. Each module includes things like definitions of terms and explanations of how existing laws impact how things are done.
One of the things we learned is there are rules about how some of these things get done that the local government doesn't have any control over. Who has authority for what? How they set spending priorities?
We try to include a good overall explanation that's easy to understand, but not make it a college course on taxation. We have one that starts out on County Budgeting 101 that just explains in very broad terms what a budget is and why we even have this process.
Then we get into local taxes. That's where we explain how to read your tax bill. We cover understanding the county budget structure, because it's not just one bucket in and one bucket out. There's different revenue streams and different expenses that go into that.
We have one that dives into the 2026 Greenville County budget specifically, based on the most recent past budget.
And then, even though there's a lot of issues in Greenville County, three were very big "hot buttons" last year with a lot of community input.
So we also have a module on the Greenville County School District. We have one on affordable housing and we have one on transportation and roads. The modules are easy to access. They're posted on our website and they're free to use.
There are written transcripts in English posted with the videos, and we actually just added Spanish language transcripts. We also posted a glossary of terms, so if you just want to look up what is a FILOT, you can do that quickly.
We have a one-page FAQs about your property taxes and a reference sheet for the research sources we used. Sometimes I want to go back to the primary source and see exactly where that came from. We tried to include as much of that as possible for people who want to take a deeper dive.
Katy Smith: That is great. I really can't say enough about how, if you want to understand how your county's budget works but also governmental budgeting in a broader sense, this is such a helpful tool.
In about an hour, you can become much more expert than probably 99% of your fellow residents, citizens, and voters. So if people want to dive in, Susan, what would you tell them? Where do they go?
How to Access the Resource
Susan Bell: The easiest way is just to search League of Women Voters Greenville County Budget Basics, and it should take you right to the landing page, which has all the information posted.
The Upcoming Budget Timeline
Katy Smith: Perfect. And of course, listeners, we will put this in the show notes for you. I can't say enough about how rich this resource is. It's almost worth bookmarking if you really have an interest in connecting with the Greenville County budget process.
As of the posting of this episode, our county is getting ready to go through this exact process, and they need to get a new budget approved for the 26-27 year by June 30th of 2026. Very timely. Susan, what do we know about this process this spring?
Susan Bell: I wish we had a definitive timeline. But what we do know is that the county administrator has prepared the starting budget and the county council plans to take that up soon.
There's a process that they go through that takes some time. We know that they plan to have some workshops. Specifically, they have one scheduled on impact fees. Then they have public hearing opportunities.
They encourage people to come and tell them what they think about this. It requires three readings. They'll introduce the budget, then they'll have discussions among the council, then they'll make amendments, they'll go back and forth, and then it has to be approved. By state law, it has to be approved by June 30th.
Katy Smith: Okay, so knowing that they meet about twice a month and they need time for workshops, that timeline will probably start soon. You can, of course, monitor this on the Greenville County's website. They have all their meetings posted every week.
Susan Bell: Absolutely. And we have a link to that from our Budget Basics homepage. We link you to the calendar. We tell you how to submit testimony, which is actually a link to one of the Simple Civics podcasts about how to give comments to council. We try to make it to where you can get all the information you need at that landing page.
Katy Smith: That is great. Well, Susan, I can't thank you and your team from the League of Women Voters of Greenville County enough for this incredible resource. This is complicated for everybody.
Our elected officials themselves are average citizens just like us. Many of them have come into this fairly new as of last year, and they had a lot of learning to do.
We're all in this together to try to learn and figure it out, and you've made it so much easier for us. I can't thank you enough for being here and for all you do for Greenville County.
Susan Bell: Thank you so much, Katy. And thank you for sharing this resource with your listeners.
Credits
Simple Civics: Greenville County is Produced by Podcast Studio X.
A Greater Good Greenville project.
